Tue Dec 23 2008 18:49Everybody Loves Dirt Candy:
A few days ago we had dinner at Dirt Candy, a tiny fancy restaurant in the East Village. It was great! And instead of being a horrible Flash monstrosity, the restaurant's website is a weblog! Where owner Amanda Cohen talks about the dishes she invented and links to BoogaBooga.

We had a great time with the spinach soup, mushroom cube, crispy tofu, popcorn pudding, etc. And it'll probably get even better once they have gas. I guess waiting for the gas to get turned on is the restaurant equivalent of waiting for Internet access after you move.

sgmllib doesn't exist in Python 3, so I switched to HTMLParser, which has gotten a lot better at parsing bad HTML. With my hacks in place, only 3 of my unit tests pass under sgmllib but fail under HTMLParser. That's acceptable given that my switching to HTMLParser creates part of the framework I'll use so that you can write a plugin for lxml, html5lib (not as slow as I'd thought), or some other parser. Eventually I'll get rid of the HTMLParser plugin, or at least strip it down so that it doesn't know anything about HTML, making my life easier.

What's left is some minor syntax problems and some huge problems dealing with the way strings work in Python 3 as they go in and out of encodings. At this point I need to stop hacking on BS and do some experiments to get a good understanding of the string changes.

Tue Dec 23 2008 21:24Best Of Bookmarks, January-February:
You may or may not know that Sumana and I keep a pile o' bookmarks on del.icio.us (actually in my personal notebook and mirrored to del.icio.us, but close enough). I don't put them on the front page of Crummy with a fancy Javascript widget or anything, because it is part of my personal notebook and I often use it to talk to myself in an invented language while doing research for something I'm writing.

But I don't mind you looking at our bookmarks, so long as you don't consider it a "publication" of mine, and there's so much interesting stuff that didn't make it into NYCB I thought I'd do a series of posts highlighting the most interesting bookmarks from 2008 that are still interesting and whose links still work. Here are the best links from January and February of 2008. I'll post one of these a day.

An excerpt from Born Standing Up, the best book Steve Martin has ever written. Contemporaneous comment: "Analyzing a joke kills it, but Steve Martin kills jokes as a matter of course, so it works out."